Hanover College - Manuscripts and Documents

About this collection

The Elias Riggs Monfort Papers contain over 120 Civil War era letters from the Monfort and Taylor families. Elias Riggs Monfort, the namesake of this collection, was a student at Hanover College in 1861 when the Civil War began. He set aside his studies to join the Ohio 6th as a private and was later mustered into the Ohio 75th as a 2nd Lieutenant and was eventually promoted to Captain. After suffering severe injuries at Gettysburg in 1863, he was honorably discharged from service and returned to his studies at Hanover. After the war he attended law school, practiced law, served as a postmaster in Cincinnati, and joined the family business as an editor for The Herald and Presbyter, the family newspaper.

E.R. wrote numerous letters to his sister, Margaret Monfort, during this time. Maggie was a student at Glendale Female College, 12 miles north of Cincinnati. Emma Taylor was also a student at Glendale—she corresponded with her brother, J. Gordon Taylor,while he was serving in the Union Army. (Emma would go on to marry Elias in 1867.)

J. Gordon Taylor entered the Ohio 71st as a captain and served as an Aide de Camp to Major-General Gordon Granger in the 4th Army Corps. He left the army in October 1864 after his father’s death. After the war he was a steamboat captain, an employee of the Internal Revenue Department in New Orleans, and eventually the secretary of the Eagle White Lead Company in Cincinnati.